Reporter's notebook: TED 2009

Reporter's notebook / TED 2009

Published 4:00 am, Saturday, February 7, 2009

Some of my favorite gee-whiz moments from this year's TED conference:

-- UC Berkeley biologist Robert Full blew everyone's mind by outlining his efforts to create the perfect robotic "distributed foot." He studies the feet and legs of geckos and cockroaches and transfers their design to robots, enabling them to scale walls. One such machine, the Spinybot, can climb glass walls.

-- As part of a talk on eradicating malaria, Bill Gates showed off his funny bone by opening a container full of mosquitoes onstage. Said Bill: "There's no reason only poor people should have the experience."

-- P.W. Singer, an academic who studies war, terrified the crowd with a detailed look at modern, robotic warfare. Something I didn't know: You can sit in a room in New Mexico and pilot armed drone airplanes in Iraq and kill people. Then you go home and have dinner with your kids. Somewhere, Aldous Huxley weeps.

-- Polish newspaper designer Jacek Utko told how his revolutionary designs have actually increased circulation and revenue at papers all across Eastern Europe over the past few years. For this ink-stained wretch, truly an unbelievable moment.

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-- Stanford's Catherine Mohr displayed the robotic surgical arm she's working on that could change medicine. Among the amazing possibilities are surgeons in the United States performing advanced surgeries in remote parts of the world.

-- Entrepreneur Shai Agassi introduced his plans to make driving a subscription service of sorts. Through removable batteries that you buy at future fueling stations, you will essentially purchase miles like minutes on a phone.

-- Film producer Jake Eberts told us about filmmaker Jacques Perrin's new film, "Oceans." Then he showed us an early cut. Simply put: The best undersea footage ever shot. You have to see this.

-- Infosys founder Nandan Nilekani talked about his new book, "Imagining India," in which he tackles the enormous issues facing a country that has one foot in the 17th century and the other in the 21st. This will be a must-read for the business world.

These are just a handful of the amazing innovations and disclosures made at TED this year. In the coming weeks and months, videos of all of these talks will be made available to the public at www.ted.com.

TED Prize winners

Deep in the heart of the TED conference lies an awards show.

Every year, the conference organizers pick three "TED Prize" winners to honor. And the winners get to make a wish that the TED community is supposed to help them realize.

Here are this year's winners along with the wishes they made.

-- Venezuelan music maestro Jose Antonio Abreu was chosen for his lifelong work with El Sistema, a program he founded that teaches disadvantaged youth to play classical music. It's helped thousands of kids, seeding orchestras around the world with Venezuelan musicians: "I wish you would help create and document a special training program for at least 50 gifted young musicians, passionate for their art and for social justice, and dedicated to developing El Sistema in the U.S. and in other countries."

-- Oceanographer Sylvia Earle was honored for her lifelong work to save the oceans: "I wish you would use all means at your disposal - films! expeditions! the Web! more!- to ignite public support for a global network of marine protected areas, hope spots large enough to save and restore the ocean, the blue heart of the planet."

-- Astronomer Jill Tarter, director of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute's Center for SETI Research, was picked for her lifelong pursuit of finding life elsewhere in the universe: "I wish that you would empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company."

Going forward, blogs will be launched and Web pages designed that will track the progress of these various wishes. It's all done voluntarily. And it's all so TED.

What is TED?

TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, is a 25-year-old annual conference attended by many of the world's leading scientists, academics and business leaders. The agenda consists of a series of talks, during which big thinkers discuss big ideas. For full coverage, go to the Tech Chronicles at sfgate.com/ZGAX.

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